Urbane to publish title on 50 years of Airbus

Indie publisher Urbane Publications is to bring out a book in May 2019 commemorating the 50th anniversary of European aerospace company Airbus.

Written by Nicola Clarke, Airbus – 50 Years will be a "comprehensive, innovative and original examination" of the first 50 years of Airbus. Going back to the roots of the Airbus story, the book will highlight Airbus as an international trailblazer in the aerospace industry, examining how it became the largest aeronautics and space company in Europe.

Urbane Publications will bring out Airbus – 50 Years as part of its recently launched business imprint, Urbane Business.

Matthew Smith, publishing director of Urbane Publications, said: "We are very pleased to be working with Airbus and Nicola on this book. It will be one of our business imprint’s flagship books for 2019 with its incisive and compelling examination of the people and events that made Airbus the successful innovator it is today. No doubt it will become compulsive reading for many of today’s business leaders and commentators.”

Rainer Ohler, head of communications of Airbus, said: “50 years of Airbus is an appropriate milestone for reflection, gratitude and a celebration of the people, products and strategies of an ever-increasing integrated aerospace industry in Europe. This task has not been an easy one, so we are all the more grateful to Nicola Clark for accepting this editorial challenge.”

Clark has covered the development of Airbus as a Paris-based correspondent for the New York Times and International Herald Tribune for many years. She said: “The more I dig into the Airbus story, the more interesting it gets. Many of the same winds that propelled the creation of the European Union – and that occasionally threaten its cohesion – have lifted and buffeted the Airbus project along the way. Equally, the struggles that accompany Airbus’s emergence as a commercial rival to Boeing mirror the complexity of relations between Europe and the United States.”